Description

Markets are an ancient institution for matching the supply for a good or service with its demand. Physical markets were typically slow to evolve, with simple institutions governing trade, and trading partners generally facing a daunting challenge in finding the “right” partner. The information technology revolution, however, has generated a sea change in how markets function: now, markets are typically complex platforms, with a range of mechanisms involved in facilitating matches among participants. Recent trends point to an unprecedented level of control over the design, implementation, and operation of markets: more than ever before, we are able to engineer the platforms governing transactions among market participants. As a consequence, market operators or platforms can control a host of variables such as pricing, liquidity, visibility, information revelation, terms of trade, and transaction fees. Given these variables, market participants often face complex problems when optimizing their own decisions. In the supply side such decisions may include the assortment of products to offer and their price structure, while in the demand side they may include how much to bid for different goods and what feedback to offer about past purchasing experiences. The decisions made by the platform and the market participants interact, sometimes in intricate and subtle ways, to determine market outcomes.

In this workshop we seek work that improves our understanding of these markets, both from the perspective of the market operator and the market participants. With respect to the former we are particularly interested in work that derives useful insights on how to design these markets, taking into account their operational details and engineering and technological constraints. With respect to the market participants, we seek work that introduces novel approaches to optimize their decisions and improves our understanding of their interactions within the market. We look for a mix of approaches including modeling, theory, and empirics, using a wide range of tools drawn from operations management, game theory, auctions and mechanism design, optimization, stochastic modeling, revenue management, econometrics, or statistics.

The list of markets to be studied includes but it is not restricted to:

Procurement markets, such as technology-enabled government procurement

Health care exchanges

Financial exchanges

Plenary speakers

The workshop will have several invited distinguished plenary speakers from academia and industry, including:

Susan Athey, Stanford GSB

Omar Besbes, Columbia Business School

Vivek Farias, MIT Sloan

Ashish Goel, Stanford MS&E

Garud Iyengar, Columbia IEOR

Paul Milgrom, Stanford Economics

Asu Ozdaglar, MIT EECS

Bob Phillips, Uber

Tuomas Sandholm, Carnegie Mellon Computer Science

Hal Varian, Google

Abstract submission

To present in the workshop we invite abstract submissions ofat most one page. Papers will be accepted either for a regular presentation, or as a poster. There are no proceedings for this workshop, so we welcome submissions of work-in-progress, or work that is submitted or accepted for publication elsewhere.